wyz2285 wrote:Resumed, I'd like to start building a decent drone that can carry a decent camera with relatively long flight time (long enough for it to cover 4km or so, sent my drone once to record a tiny island 1,6km off coast, pretty useful). Is it possible?

Fixed or rotary wing? It would seem to me that if range was a concern the rotary option is fairly limiting.

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hectmarr wrote:You have to make many weapons, because this field is long and short life

My first thought when I saw those going viral on imgur was "The internals on those would be a mess, half of those designs look like they couldn't be held at all, and only one of them looks even slightly comfortable - and even then I'm not sure how you'd aim it."

My second thought was "Wait, WHO posted this? Is this some kind of weird prank?"

I've got to be frank, those things make the legendarily bad USFA "Zip 22" look well designed.

A few years ago I built a quad with the intent of long flight times and the ability to carry a camera, even autonomous flight on preset 'missions'. Can't really say it was a success, could never really get rid of vibrations affecting the image. Maybe if i spent a bit more on better components it would have been possible...

From memory you are going to want the biggest props spinning at a low speed to get the lifting power and range, and a massive battery, all expensive stuff.

I used a pixhawk http://pixhawk.org/ as its 'brain', there is some cool open source computer interface for it if you are into that sort of thing called mission planner,. You can get cheaper clones all over the web. This can be reconfigured to control any form of vehicle which is pretty cool. Has some inbuilt commands that could trigger camera shutters.But yea, that was quite a few years ago and i dont know what is happening lately, I remember when the DJI mavik came out, i thought the off the shelf offerings had improved to the point you couldnt get much more by building something yourself.